I am the last person who should be giving directions, but here it goes from what I know.

First you need to prepare a picture that is fairly small and compact. As you see on mine, I just cropped out Hannah's head from a picture. I think the picture size can only be 60 pixels by 60 pixels. Karen and Paul are very helpful here and if you can't get the picture to the appropriate size, they will help you. There is a post about Avatars in the last section of Pet Talk, under Other, General which has the address where you can send your prospective Avatar to one of them. I think Karen is gone so you might want to ask Paul for help. Once you have your picture at the right size on your hard drive, you want to go to your user cp
section (see way at the top of the page) and then to edit options. Down at the bottom of that section, it shows where you can change or add your avatar.

Please correct me anyone if I have steered Carla wrong. Good luck.